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Google Authorship Dead In 2014?

If you’ve searched for anything on Google in the last month or so (who hasn’t?), you may have noticed slight changes in the results. First, the author pictures next to the results conspicuously disappeared. Then, videos started to vanish for most results (except those of YouTube and other sources where video is a primary source of content). Now, author names have disappeared. According to John Mueller from Google’s Webmaster Analytics team, Authorship has indeed been removed from your search results.

A few months ago, the same search would have displayed the associated Google+ profile picture and related information, as shown in the image below from our prior Authorship blog post:

Now the posts are stripped down to provide you the content that you’re looking for without the fluff.

Why Was Authorship Removed?

If you ever set up authorship, then you know it was not the easiest process to start with. There were several steps involved, including an update your site’s code to add the markup. If you were using a CMS like WordPress, the markup wasn’t too hard, but HTML sites were a little harder to modify. Since the entire ordeal wasn’t an easy 1-2 step process, it had a low adoption rate.

As stated in Mueller’s post, and speculated by many, Authorship simply did not have any direct impact to an increase in clicks or rankings. A direct quote from the post:

“If you’re curious — in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.”

Is Authorship Completely Dead?

From search results, it appears to be mostly (though not entirely) gone. As explained by Mueller, search queries will still show relevant posts from your Google+ connections with their information. So if you were connected with an author and searched for information pertaining to them, then you may see something like this:

Keep in mind, the rel=author markup didn’t just affect search; social media displays this information as well. With Pinterest, you can stand out with rich pins. As you see in the picture below, you will still see the author markup:

You can also see it on Twitter with Twitter cards as shown below. If you’re able to edit the author Twitter handle, you’ll also get another spot in the author section.

Conclusion

Although authorship has been mostly removed from Google search, it still does serve a purpose and cannot be entirely considered dead.. perhaps undead… zombie(?). You don’t necessarily need to go through the process adding the authorship through Google+ to include the rel=author tag, but who wouldn’t want a good branded back link on a Google product?

What do you think? Is authorship just dead and should never be touched again or will you still be including it on your blog? Let us know in the comments!

Kyler is a Marketing Manager at HostGator. You can usually catch him writing articles or running around to get things done. Other than that, he’s out there fighting crime. It may not be real crime, but someone has to call others out on Reddit. Check him out at KylerPatterson.com

For now at least, Google Authorship is completely gone from Google search results. It’s really frustrating to see when such things happne. We as a blog owner have to work a lot to get Google authorship implemented on our blogs. And when everything seem to be working fine, you came to know all of your hard work is going in vain due to Google unplanned strategies.

Kyler Patterson

25 September 2014 at
1:19 pm

Yes, it was a pain to get authorship implemented. So now that we don’t have to worry about that anymore, that’s good. Right?

Kyler Patterson

26 September 2014 at
10:01 am

How useful was it really though? Based on their analytics (which we don’t have access to of course) authorship didn’t really increase click throughs. I mean, I liked it because I loved seeing my picture and name in search results. Now that they’re not there, I’m slightly sad. However, it’s not like I’ve seen a decrease in rankings due to it.